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cheap prints on the walls, of battles, early Presidents, and voluptuous
recumbent sultanas, and the tiresome and everlasting young girl putting
her grandfather's spectacles on; execrated in my heart the cheerful
canary and the distracting parrot that few barbers' shops are without.
Finally, I searched out the least dilapidated of last year's illustrated
papers that littered the foul center-table, and conned their
unjustifiable misrepresentations of old forgotten events.
At last my turn came. A voice said "Next!" and I surrendered to--No. 2,
of course. It always happens so. I said meekly that I was in a hurry,
and it affected him as strongly as if he had never heard it. He shoved
up my head, and put a napkin under it. He plowed his fingers into my
collar and fixed a towel there. He explored my hair with his claws and
suggested that it needed trimming. I said I did not want it trimmed. He
explored again and said it was pretty long for the present style--better
have a little taken off; it needed it behind especially. I said I had
had it cut only a week before. He yearned over it reflectively a moment,
and then asked with a disparaging manner, who cut it? I came back at him
promptly with a "You did!" I had him there. Then he fell to stirring up
his lather and regarding himself in the glass, stopping now and then to
get close and examine his chin critically or inspect a pimple. Then he
lathered one side of my face thoroughly, and was about to lather the
other, when a dog-fight attracted his attention, and he ran to the window
and stayed and saw it out, losing two shillings on the result in bets
with the other barbers, a thing which gave me great satisfaction. He
finished lathering, and then began to rub in the suds with his hand.
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